Focus Prosody Revisited | Syntactic Constraints on the Prosodic Encoding of Focus in Selected English Audiobooks

This book is an attempt at building a multi-factorial model to account for the prosodic marking of focus. The main hypothesis of the model is that the prosodic realization of focus makes direct or indirect reference to its syntactic configuration. We explicitly adopt a probabilistic account in such a way as to assume that syntax places constraints on the prosodic encoding of focus,and that relevant syntactic factors contribute to the eventual prosodic encoding of focus. To this end, we propose a syntactic paradigm of focus that categorizes focus in terms of two syntactic variables to investigate their impacts on focus prosody. These two variables are syntactic markedness and syntactic domain. To investigate the impacts of these independent syntactic variables, three dependent prosodic variables are proposed that correspond to the three main components of prosody: prosodic phrasing, prosodic prominence, and tonal contour. The data of the study consists of three audiobboks for three novels written by Lee Stewart. The corpus is etirely narrative in an attempt to keep only one independent syntactic factor, namely syntax, and to avoid the interfereing effects of genre on focus prosody.